Communism’s great, if you’re a Castro

Havana

Earlier this
month, the world was reminded that even though Communism is a great
way to destroy an economy and to impoverish a nation’s inhabitants,
there are always a few people who live luxuriously under the system:
namely, the rulers, their cronies, and their families.

Tony Castro, who
is a grandson of Fidel Castro, is on Instagram, where he has about
1300 followers. Until recently, ordinary citizens of Cuba weren’t
allowed Internet access at all. But those rules don’t apply, of
course, to members of the ruling dynasty.

Tony Castro at sea

Recently, the
Miami Herald and other south Florida media published some photographs
that young Tony (he’s reportedly in his twenties) has posted on his
Instagram account. One of them shows Tony sunbathing on a yacht. Of
course, ordinary Cubans can’t afford yachts – and if they boarded
one, they’d be arrested pronto because the assumption would be that
they were about to escape the island prison set up by Tony’s
grandfather sixty years ago.

Another of Tony’s
Instagram snaps showed him celebrating the birthday of an uncle at
what looks like a pretty swanky bistro. He and his uncle raise a
toast with champagne glasses. We’re talking here, of course, about
the princeling of a country where basic food items are in extremely
short supply.

Driving the BMW

In yet another
picture we can see Tony at the wheel of a BMW. Need we comment?

Other pictures
show him in Panama City, Panama; in Barcelona and Madrid; and at a
Mexican beach resort, Ciudad del Carmen, which is located on the Gulf
of Mexico and is known as “the pearl of the Gulf.” Needless to
say, ordinary Cubans aren’t allowed to exit their own country under
any circumstances, and certainly could never afford to visit places
like these.

In Madrid

It’s been a long time since the Castros took over Cuba, but the rhetoric of revolution has never ceased. The people of Cuba may not get much in the way of good food, but they’re fed a huge daily diet of propaganda about the wonderful benefits of their glorious revolution and about the evils of capitalism. And more than a few suckers in the democratic capitalist world – some of them working for major media organizations – buy into this baloney.

Karl Vick

Take Karl Vick of Time Magazine, whom we wrote about in August 2015. This credulous jackass describes Cuba as a “security state” in order to avoid such unpleasant terms as “dictatorship” or “police state.” He has written: “People enjoy life in Cuba as in few other places.” When he claimed in a radio interview that Cuba could boast of certain achievements, he was asked to name one such achievement. “Social equity,” Vick said, and went on to assert that nobody in Cuba is “much higher than anybody else.”

“The pearl of the Gulf”

Vick
isn’t alone in believing that – and in thinking that this supposed
equity is enough to justify any disagreeable aspects of the Cuban
regime. Of course, over the decades there has been ample testimony to
the fact that the Castros live like kings and that the whole equity
thing is a sham. But Tony Castro’s pictures – coming to light only
days after the 60th
anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, and at a time when a frightening
number of young Americans consider socialism cool – provide a neat
reminder of just what a lie Communism is.